Humans hunted for meat 1.6 million years earlier than previously thought

[Ichingcarpenter]

Evidence from ancient butchery site in Tanzania shows early man was capable of ambushing herds up to 1.6 million years earlier than previously thought

Ancient humans used complex hunting techniques to ambush and kill antelopes, gazelles, wildebeest and other large animals at least two million years ago. The discovery – made by anthropologist Professor Henry Bunn of Wisconsin University – pushes back the definitive date for the beginning of systematic human hunting by hundreds of thousands of years.

Two million years ago, our human ancestors were small-brained apemen and in the past many scientists have assumed the meat they ate had been gathered from animals that had died from natural causes or had been left behind by lions, leopards and other carnivores.


But Bunn argues that our apemen ancestors, although primitive and fairly puny, were capable of ambushing herds of large animals after carefully selecting individuals for slaughter. The appearance of this skill so early in our evolutionary past has key implications for the development of human intellect.

“We know that humans ate meat two million years ago,” said Bunn, who was speaking in Bordeaux at the annual meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE). “What was not clear was the source of that meat. However, we have compared the type of prey killed by lions and leopards today with the type of prey selected by humans in those days. This has shown that men and women could not have been taking kill from other animals or eating those that had died of natural causes. They were selecting and killing what they wanted.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/09/23/discovery-humans-hunted-for-meat-1-6-million-years-earlier-than-previously-thought/



I got a bunch of questions on this.

Did the group hunting preclude human speech? I saw some documentary on african bushman hunting a gazelle and there are strategies and communication involved in long hunts.... We could out run them so the hunt took many hours.

Now about the killing weapons and the technologies involved?


If the brain was growing because of the protein increase what exact hominid are they talking about?

[longship]

1. Gees, I read that title entirely wrong

I got it backwards and thought, "What was hunting the humans for meat?"

Doh!!

[mysuzuki2]

2. This is actually not that new.

We know that modern chimps will cooperatively hunt small mammals so group hunting does not necessarily require speech and language. However, speech could be expected to lead to greater efficiency and success in hunting. if a hominid species was beginning to depend on hunting for food, as chimps really do not, language ability might very well be selected for. Simple stone tools have been found at about 2.5 mya which show wear marks suggestive of being used to cut meat. The hominids around at that time, excluding the robust australopithecines, were Australopithecus garhi in east Africa and A. africanus in south Africa. They had cranial capacities of about 450cc, about 50cc bigger than modern chimps. At this time, I think, the hominid lineage was beginning to develop more human like behavior and cognitive abilities.

[pinto]

3. Good read. Other related articles from the original source, The Guardian's 'The Observer' -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/sep/23/human-hunting-evolution-2million-years

[aquart]

4. They're confusing some stuff here.

There is evidence of a lean time where we scavenged, eating AFTER the lions and jackals. This is something different. It's not one or the other.

Also, we pretty much always had small animal meat caught with nets and, probably, traps. We ate a ton of bunnies. We're omnivorous. We can eat almost anything but grass.

Lions eat protein. Do their brains grow? Protein may fuel evolution but it doesn't drive it. Lotta protein eaters out there.

As for speech, apes communicate opinions and behaviors now. If they did group hunting then you have to assume that communication was effective for the purpose.

They found a butchery site. But was it in continuous use or only for special events like religious festivals? Which would mean a whole lot of other human traits were active earlier than believed. (And if we had religion, then you have your answer about language because they function off the same associative/symbolic reasoning.)

They've done a lot of deducing here. Logically, if we had the tool assemblage to butcher, then we had the capacity to make tools that kill.The big leap was identifying animals that lions didn't eat. Except, of course, they were looking at lions TODAY and humans THEN. Personally, I think that's ludicrous. My confirming factor would be long-term use of butchery site itself. You don't need that if you are following cats and grabbing what's left.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

5. Homo habilis

spears and stones

Steven Mithen proposed the term Hmmmmm for the pre-linguistic system of communication used by archaic Homo, beginning with Homo ergaster..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#Primate_language

answers in reverse order

[AndyTiedye]

6. Communication by Gestures, and even Dancing, Likely Preceded Speech

How do you try to communicate with someone who does not speak your language?
Most likely you use gestures.
Very likely early man did the same for millennia before they developed spoken language.